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The 74 Million
TikTok Helped Teachers and Students Stay Connected During the Pandemic. Now Trump Has Moved to Ban It
When schools closed in March because of the coronavirus, Vanessa Cronin
had no idea how to make instructions for her Spanish lessons engaging
enough for her students to read.
“So now I’m supposed to type my instructions in an email?” Cronin, who
teaches at Marine Science Magnet High School in Groton, Connecticut,
asked herself. “I could picture my kids at home saying things like,
‘Too long. Too boring. I won’t read this.’”
Then she remembered how much her students love TikTok, the
video-sharing social media app that President Donald Trump now wants to
ban as a threat to national security.
Cronin began recording the short videos and posting links on Google Classroom. The response was immediate.
“OMG Señora, I love your TikToks. They make me laugh,” she said one student told her.
“It was beautiful,” Cronin said. “We were no longer together, but this app somehow made us all feel closer to each other.”
The alleged threat to national security comes as the app’s popularity
is exploding. Holed up in their homes since March, tweens and teens
have passed the time doing the Renegade and other viral dance moves on
TikTok, sharing banana bread recipes and testing their core strength
with plank challenges.
But on Thursday, Trump issued an executive order that would ban the app
from operating in the United States in 45 days if it is not sold by its
Chinese parent company, ByteDance.
“TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its
users, including Internet and other network activity information such
as location data and browsing and search histories,” Trump said in the
text of the order issued Thursday evening. “This data collection
threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’
personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to
track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build
dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate
espionage.”
One digital marketing agency estimates that since November 2018,
TikTok’s monthly active users in the U.S. have jumped from 20 million
to more than 80 million, 60 percent of them between the ages of 16 and
34. According to another analysis, children between 4 and 15 now use
TikTok as much as YouTube. Similar to Instagram — but relying on 15- or
60-second clips — TikTok allows users to change their voices, create
sounds and add special effects to their videos.
Educators like Cronin find the app to be an accessible method for
turning what they do in the classroom every day into digital content.
“It’s awful,” Cronin said about the possibility that she wouldn’t be
able to use TikTok anymore, calling it her “go-to tool” when she has to
teach something students might have a hard time with.
Juliette Reyes, who graduated this spring from American Heritage
School, a private school in south Florida, said TikTok videos were a
vital resource in preparing for her Advanced Placement exams.
“Some TikToks have highlighted free educational resources such as
online college courses, book search engines and other materials I could
then use to prepare for big exams or general assignments,” she said.
She and her friends also depended on TikTok to follow the College
Board’s changing decisions about conducting AP tests this year.
“Everyone was confused,” she said. “But kids on TikTok would use funny
clips and videos, not just to help me prep for the exam but also keep
me updated on any changes.”
Other students say TikTok has been their source for news about COVID-19 and conflicts throughout the world.
“TikTok has particularly helped me consume current events in a more
digestible manner without having the need to scroll through numerous
articles on a news feed,” said Victor Ye, who graduated this year from
Glen A. Wilson High School in Hacienda Heights, California.
‘Subject matter expertise’
The president has turned up the rhetoric against TikTok amid concerns
that the app would spread political propaganda as the election nears.
TikTok users claimed they helped embarrass the president by inflating
attendance expectations at a June rally for Trump in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Some branches of the military have already prohibited service members
from downloading the app. The House voted last month to keep it off
government-issued phones, and the Senate followed suit with a unanimous
vote on Thursday.
Questions about the app’s fate, however, come as the company is
attempting to refine its image for an education audience, including
millions of young users stuck at home. In May, TikTok launched
#LearnOnTikTok as part of its $50 million Creative Learning Fund. The
initiative features videos from educational institutions, nonprofits
and celebrity scientists such as Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and
includes grants to educators to adapt their content knowledge for
distance learning.
Though the program was originally intended as a three-month effort, the
company has extended it through October because many school districts
will start the year in an all-virtual or hybrid format.
The U.S. division has formed a partnership with the National
Association for Media Literacy Education on “Be Informed,” a series of
infomercial-type posts focusing on discerning fact from opinion,
checking the credibility of sources and analyzing graphics.
The company has also worked with the National PTA, Common Sense Media
and other internet safety groups on a youth portal that instructs young
users in creating secure passwords, blocking other users and following
digital literacy basics.
But the president said he would follow through with the ban unless
ByteDance sells TikTok. On Sunday, Microsoft released a statement
saying that it was “prepared to continue discussions to explore a
purchase of TikTok in the United States.” The president, however, has
added that the U.S. Treasury should receive a portion of the sale,
which could complicate the transaction.
TikTok has said it does not share user data. TikTok U.S. General
Manager Vanessa Pappas used the platform to address the issue. “We’re
not planning on going anywhere,” she said. “We’re building the safest
app because we know it’s the right thing to do.”
Speaking students’ language
Bart Epstein, CEO of the Jefferson Education Exchange, which helps
education leaders make decisions about educational technology, said
TikTok is smart to market itself as a source of educational content.
But he thinks the app has greater potential as a vehicle for education
researchers to share their findings, just like many do on Twitter. And
with the right privacy protections, it could allow phones to be used in
the classroom as a way for students to create media, instead of being
viewed as a distraction.
He called Microsoft the underdog in educational technology compared to
Google, but he suggested the company could use TikTok to increase its
share of the market.
Due to Microsoft’s support of educational causes, he said, “It wouldn’t
surprise me to see them look for ways to synergistically get benefit
from TikTok in the education market.”
Teachers who already have a large following on TikTok include Shane
Saeed, a fourth-grade teacher at Red Hawk Elementary in Erie, Colorado,
who posted this video on the different purposes authors have for
writing:
Another is Maya Espiritu, an Oceanside, California, elementary teacher who posts vocabulary-building and read-aloud videos.
Other teachers find the platform useful for giving students suggestions on ways to improve their focus.
“I realized there is a niche of teaching educational psychology,” said
Desmond Fambrini, a former Teach for America member who now works as a
homeschool teacher and tutor. He’s posted videos on topics such as
chewing gum in school and finding the right time of day to do
schoolwork.
As with Pinterest, teachers are using TikTok to post classroom hacks
and ideas for lessons. Past research has shown that some of the most
popular sites for teachers are not always aligned with academic
standards.
TikTok probably won’t be the platform for “deep, rich curriculum
content,” said Julia Kaufman, a senior policy researcher at the RAND
Corp. But it does create opportunities to hook students with bite-size
information, she said.
That’s how Baeza Lakew, who attends Kentlake High School in Kent, Washington, learned about key events in Black history.
“To this day, Black Wall Street and the Tulsa race riots are rarely
covered in schools,” she said. “I would’ve never learned this
information if it wasn’t for a TikTok video that gave me the foundation
of knowledge I needed to do my own research.”
In surveys of both teachers and parents, RAND researchers are hearing
that keeping students interested in learning has been the greatest
challenge during the pandemic. “Using [TikTok] to try to engage
students makes sense,” Kaufman said.
Cronin also uses the app to reach other teachers with her
@empoweredteachingpodcast. But it’s the connections she’s maintained
with students during lockdowns that she’s found especially valuable.
“We all became closer during tough times because of this silly app,”
she said. “I get paid to teach my students a second language, but if I
don’t speak the same language that my kids do, I will not be able to do
my job efficiently.”
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